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Dev Patel is the Chaiwala living the dream in Slumdog Millionaire |
Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: Dev Patel (Jamal Malik), Freida Pinto (Latika), Madhur
Mittal (Salim), Anil Kapoor (Prem Kumar), Irrfan Khan (Inspector), Ayush Mahesh
Khedehar (Jamal [Child]), Tanay Chheda (Jamal [Teenager]), Azharuddin Mohammed
Ismail (Salim [Child]), Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala (Salim [Teenager]), Runbina Ali
(Latika [Child]), Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar (Latika [Teenager]), Saurabh Shukla
(Constable Srinivsas), Mahesh Manjrekar (Javred), Ankur Vikal (Maman)
Re-watching Slumdog
Millionaire, it’s surprising to think that back in 2008 this film was so
garlanded with awards (EIGHT Oscars!) and heralded so quickly as a classic.
While it’s a well-made and at times rather sweet (with a hard-edge) fable, it’s
also seems slightly less unique and genre-defying than first appeared. Never
mind a list of the greatest Best Picture winners, I’m not even sure it’s the
greatest Danny Boyle movie. But saying this, it’s still a fine movie – and one
I arguably enjoyed more re-watching it almost ten years on then when I saw it
in the cinema.
Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is an eighteen year-old Muslim, a
chaiwala working in a Mumbai call centre. He enters the Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, hosted
by egotistical Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor), and to the astonishment of everyone is
one question away from the ultimate prize of 20 million rubles. Arrested by the
police and questioned before his final show, he explains via flashbacks how his
experiences allowed him to answer each question. His life-story is one of
danger and conflict in the slums and criminal underworld of India, tied closely
to his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and their childhood friend Latika (Frieda
Pinto), whom Jamal has loved his whole life.
Part social-realist tale, romance, family drama and
fairy-tale, Slumdog’s main triumph is
probably its ability to juggle half a dozen tones and genres so successfully.
This is most strikingly demonstrated by fact that so many came out of a film
that opens with its lead character being waterboarded and tortured by
policemen, saying it was a brilliant feel-good movie! In fact, Boyle’s film is
far more complex, touching on themes ranging from child exploitation and
prostitution to gangland politics to social corruption, via murder, betrayal
and mutilation. How does this a film crammed with this sort of material make
you feel rather positive at the end?
Boyle’s, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy’s, trick is to
follow in the footsteps of that other great juggler of urban social comment and
larger-than-life characters – Charles Dickens. Dickensian is perhaps the best
word to describe Slumdog – it throws
the viewer into the slums of Mumbai, glancing at this world with all the keen
social commentary Dickens used to bring to Victorian London. As young children,
Jamal and Salim are thrown in with a Fagin-like gang boss, while Latika
develops an (admittedly much more gentle) Estelle-like connection with them
both. Like David Copperfield, our
hero moves from place to place (or frying pan to fire!), with an episodic
charm, each event adding to the spectrum of his life. It works really well as
it taps into a reassuringly familiar story structure that makes us feel
narratively safe, no matter how much peril our heroes undergo.
What’s fascinating is placing this familiar material into
(for us) a more exotic location. I suspect many American viewers watching were even
less familiar with India as such a mixture of extreme wealth and poverty sit
side-by-side so naturally (and again how Dickensian does that sound?). Anthony
Dod Mantle’s cinematography is astounding for its energetic immersion in the
streets of Mumbai –it’s like an explosion of Boyle’s high-octane, camera-shaking
style seen in so many of his other films. It not only makes the film feel fresh
and vital, it also manages to present India as something very different for
those only familiar with the country as a Taj Mahal postcard.
The most compelling parts of the film are those in the first
half that throw us into the Mumbai of Jamal and Salim’s childhood. Helped
immensely by six terrific performances from the child and teenager versions of
our three leads, these sequences (just over the first half of the movie)
immediately involve the viewer in the fates and feelings of these characters.
Perhaps because the film is shot in such an immersive style, you feel as if you
have experienced the dangers (and occasional joys) alongside them, and developed
a close bond with them.
Despite the romantic plot of the movie, the true story is
the jagged relationship, with its loyalties and betrayals, between the
innocent, gentle dreamer Jamal and the more ruthless, realist Salim. The film
charts the lengths they will go to protect and help each other – or sometimes
in Salim’s case not. Salim is a fascinating character – easily the deepest,
most conflicted of the three – who even as a child has a moral flexibility, happy
to gain the benefits of a ruthless criminal lifestyle, while still having enough
conscience to know what he has done with his life is wrong.
In contrast, the relationship between Latika and Jamal is
far less complex. Frieda Pinto doesn’t actually appear until almost two thirds
of the way into the movie – and she and Patel have only really one dialogue
scene together to establish a romantic link. The romance between them is in
fact the standard fairy-tale – two young friends as children who become unknowing
sweethearts. The film relies on us being invested in their fates as children to
want to be together, rather than building a link between two grown adults. This
is the structure of a Prince Charming and a Princess in distress rather than
grown-up storytelling – but it clearly works because it taps into our own
fundamental first experiences of how stories work.
Dev Patel is a very sweet and highly engaging lead – and how
could we not be immediately on the side of a pleasant, gentle young man whom we
first see hanging from a ceiling with electrodes on his feet? Patel has a
low-key decency about him that becomes more engaging the more you watch the
film. Since most of his narrative function is to offer linking scenes to the
far more dynamic and exciting flashbacks – and since the character of Jamal has
very little real depth to him beyond “he’s a good guy” (again like a fairytale his
innocence is untouched by events) – it’s quite a testament to his performance
that you end up feeling as close to him as you do.
But it’s clear to me second time around the framing device
of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire contest
is the most disposable, and least interesting part of the movie. It does have
the film’s most outright enjoyable adult performance, a swaggering, ego-filled turn
from Amil Kapoor, but it’s still all much more predictable, obvious and
functional than the adventures we see as our characters grow up. We know Jamal
is going to keep getting things right (and thank goodness each question he
answers, he learned the answers consecutively through his life! What a mess
that might have been otherwise narratively!), so the fact that Boyle keeps what
is essentially the same scene each time seeming interesting is quite something.
The gameshow however is the “quest” of this romantic
fairy-tale. And fairy-tale is really what the film is: Jamal is there to try
and find and save Latika. So in the end it doesn’t really matter that Latika
hardly feels like a character, or that we’ve been given no real reason to think
she and Jamal are in love other than the film telling us that they are, or that
the plot of the film is really as flimsy as tissue paper. The film is a dream,
a romantic fable. The genius of Boyle is to use a whole load of familiar,
Dickenisan-style tropes to place this into a social-realist travelogue, a
dynamite dance of flamboyant film-making techniques. So perhaps that is the
point about Slumdog: on repeated
viewings, like fairy-tales, its plot tricks and narrative sleight-of-hand
become more obvious. But you get more of a respect for the confidence with
which the trick is played.
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